The motivation of this project comes from wanting to understand whether certain media outlets are more likely to post pictures of individuals in uniform to emphasize on a narrative that resonates or sympathizes with the authority. For example, in protests, do media feature pictures of the police or protestors more to promote a certain narrative? In the ICA conference last year, political science researchers are just starting to analyze news images, and I think this could be a very fruitful area of research.

To classify large amount of images, I trained a neural network using 2048 images of individuals in uniform and 1840 of random images. The model achieves 88% accuracy, which isn’t all that great but has given me a first taste of image classification.

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